Where No Child Left Behind Went Wrong

Recently President Obama started talking about the first substantive changes to the No Child Left Behind Act in its 10-year history. He argued that while the goal of closing the achievement gap between students of different ethnicities and income levels is a laudatory one, the levers and incentives that the program has in place are not working. I couldn’t agree more, but I still have a fundamental disagreement with the narrow focus of No Child Left Behind. It has a retrograde emphasis on teaching children “the basics” (followed by annual testing on the same) using subjects and methods more relevant to the past mass-production era, rather than the creative, global, innovation- and information-driven economy that we are in.

Less of the Three R’s, More of the Four C’s

To put it bluntly, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) should stop focusing exclusively on the “Three R’s” (reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic), and should focus much more on the Four C’s: Creativity, Complexity, Curiosity, and Collaboration. Without a solid grasp on these, we are not preparing students to be meaningful contributors in the current and future world. Ironically, by focusing on the basics, NCLB is increasing the gap between students’ abilities to be successful, not decreasing them.

Creativity

If you lack the ability to be creative, inventive, and resourceful, and look at problems from a fresh perspective, you’re not much use to many employers these days. Creativity doesn’t have to mean drawing, writing great prose, or other activities stereotypically associated with the word. It simply means being able to envision a different way of doing things or entertaining an alternative idea for the future, and then manifesting it in some form that others can understand and act on. In a world where organizations of all stripes and sizes are struggling to understand how to adapt and become better, business-as-usual won’t cut it, and creativity is needed to find new answers. The best engineers, scientists and managers are all highly creative. It’s the creative leaps that separate the good from the great.

But how do you test for creativity? Standardized testing can evaluate knowledge and comprehension, but it has no notion of the creative spark. On a multiple-choice test, a creative person will likely come up with “E) A different answer entirely” or wonder “Is this even the right question to be asking?”

Complexity

Life and work are both far more complicated than they used to be. More choices to make, more information to absorb, more things that need to get done. If you don’t start teaching people young how to manage complexity, it’s very difficult to learn later in life. And above all, these days we face tremendous amounts of ambiguity. What should we do? How should we behave? What should we think? What should we believe? The answers to these big questions get less clear-cut all the time (despite many willing to offer over-simplified answers), whether you are talking about business challenges or one’s personal life.

Standardized testing drives home the implication that there is a clear, definitive answer to every question. This has never been the case, and is even less so today and in the future. But we are not preparing students properly for ambiguity. Anecdotal evidence from conversations with university professors (including my wife), show a clear concern that students today are much less capable of understanding and solving ambiguous problems. They want to be told what to do and what the answer is. NCLB isn’t the only contributing factor to this problem, but it certainly hasn’t helped.

Curiosity

As education and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson has observed, we don’t even know what jobs will look like in five years, let alone 50. Yet we are still educating students largely as though jobs have not changed in the last half century. We cannot predict how the multitude of changes in work, culture, technology, the environment, the economy, and so on, will play out. But what we can do is give people tools and mental models for comprehending and navigating change. This means cultivating kids’ inherent sense of curiosity, and in particular giving them ways of learning how to learn so that they can proactively stay prepared for an unpredictable future. The rote learning and memorization that NCLB and standardized testing emphasize are the antithesis of what’s needed for encouraging students to explore new ideas.

Collaboration

K-12 education is still largely predicated on the notion of individual work, and tests us as individuals rather than as members of collaborative groups. Looking at the work of others is frowned upon, and there is very little emphasis on learning the skills that it takes to work in teams (outside of sports, and sports teams are not very good analogies for work teams). Standardized testing also puts all the emphasis on the final answer rather than the process used to get there, and anyone who has worked in team settings know that how you handle the process contributes to final success as much as the answer you come up with (especially since for today’s complex, ambiguous problems, there is usually more than one answer).

These Four Cs are also critical ingredients for individuals and organizations to innovate. Innovation means seeing new answers in an ambiguous world, taking on the risks that come with doing something different, and working with others to make the change happens and tackle the complexities that inevitably come up. But as I see all the time when running workshops, today’s executives and organizations feel ill-equipped to innovate, and don’t believe they have what it takes to be creative. I don’t foresee this situation improving soon in the U.S., given how students are being educated now.

Reading, writing, and mathematics are all important for innovation, but they are far from sufficient. Unfortunately, the subjects that put more emphasis on the Four Cs, such as art, music and drama, have all been systematically eliminated from K-12 curricula due to budget cuts and the No Child Left Behind sword of Damocles that threatens any school not able to deliver on test scores for “the basics”. This is especially true in lower-income school districts, resulting in a very unequal distribution of people who are set up for success in the future, a pattern that reinforces ethnic and income differences rather than reducing them.

If we cannot better prepare all students to understand the Four Cs, then the American economy as well as its social fabric are all in grave risk.

Partner Center

The email and password entered aren’t matching to our records. Please try again, or reset your password. If you have a username from our previous site, start by using that. Please See our FAQ for more.

If you are signing in for the first time on the new HBR.org but have an existing account, please enter your existing user name and password to migrate your account.Please see Frequently Asked Questions for more information.